Posts Tagged ‘Portlandia’
Wednesday Links!
* Great moments in CFPs: The Journal of Dracula Studies.
* There is nothing wrong with thinking concretely and practically about how we can free ourselves from social institutions that place such confining limits on the kind of society we are able to have. Because of one thing we can be certain: the present system will either be replaced or it will go on forever.
* CNN’s Van Jones says Keystone pipeline only creates 35 permanent jobs.
* How Colleges Flunk Mental Health.
* Tracking PhD outcomes at Penn State.
* IRS Suggests ‘Reasonable’ Ways of Calculating Adjuncts’ Hours.
* Marvel Body Mass Index Study Reveals Nearly 1/3 of Female Characters Are Underweight.
* College graduates are less likely to lose their jobs than workers with less education, but once they do they are actually a bit more likely than others to join the ranks of the long-term unemployed. And workers over 45 are especially likely to spend a long time unemployed.
* 80,000 March in North Carolina.
* NBC single-handedly pays for a fifth of all Olympic Games.
* When the CIA came to Iowa City.
* 3,863,484: The LEGO sublime.
* You don’t understand hipster post-irony, dad! But it’s true: I don’t understand what Fred Armisen is doing.
* Contact with the market can be hazardous to usability; nationalize Twitter.
* Adam Kotsko vs. the difference principle.
* NASA now accepting applications to mine the moon.
* “Americans are apparently less skeptical of astrology than they have been at any time since 1983,” proclaims the most depressing lede of all time.
* The sheep look up: The Sixth Mass Extinction Event. The Sixth Mass Extinction Event. 105 Winter Olympians Call for Climate Action. Another water disaster in West Virginia. The Fossil Fuel Industry Just Had a Really, Really Bad Day.
* Change we can believe in: Why Dragonlance should be the next fantasy film franchise.
* Duke’s Own™ Mitch Fraas in the New York Times, tracking libraries looted by Nazis.
* And rest in peace, Shirley Temple and Stuart Hall.
Post *All* the Links
A big post, catching up from most of last week:
* Science fiction on the BBC: A brief history of all-women societies.
* Top Five Most Destroyed Canadian Cities in the Marvel Universe.
* News from MLA! Dissing the Dissertation. Anguish Trumps Activism at the MLA.
* News from my childhood: Another new version of Dungeons & Dragons is on the way. MetaFilter agonizes.
* News from the Montana Supreme Court: “Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people — human beings — to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creatures of government…”
* News from the future right now: Record Heat Floods America With Temperatures 40 Degrees Above Normal.
* How College Football Bowls Earn Millions In Profits But Pay Almost Nothing In Taxes.
And what ends up happening there is that the candidate with the big stack of donor money always somehow manages to survive the inevitable scandals and tawdry revelations, while the one who’s depending on checks from grandma and $25 internet donations from college students always winds up mysteriously wiped out.
* Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda.
* How The Cave of Time taught us to love interactive entertainment.
* Inside the Shel Silverstein archive.
* While genomic research on the super-old is in its very early stages, what’s fascinating is what the researchers are not finding. These people’s genomes are fundamentally the same as other people’s. They are clearly very special, but not in ways that are obvious.
* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1955.
* The headline reads, “Quadriplegic Undocumented Immigrant Dies In Mexico After Being Deported From His Hospital Bed.”
* Dallas teen missing since 2010 was mistakenly deported.
* A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Arkham Asylum.
* Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Mouse Carcasses. Keep in mind: that’s their defense.
* Obama Openly Asks Nation Why On Earth He Would Want To Serve For Another Term.
* Romney: Elected office is for the rich.
* How banks and debt collectors are bringing dead debt back to life.
People who stop paying bills earn lousy credit ratings but eventually are freed of old debt under statutes of limitations that vary by state and range from three years to 10 years from the last loan payment.
But if a debtor agrees to make even a single payment on an expired debt, the clock starts anew on some part of the old obligation, a process called “re-aging.”
So if borrowers again fall behind on their payments, debt collectors can turn to their usual tools: letters, phone calls and lawsuits. By restarting a debt’s statute of limitations, the collectors have years to retrieve payments.
* Wells Tower: In Gold We Trust.
* Epic Doctor Who Timeline. More here.
* Battlestar Galactica: Totally planned. See also.
* The cast of Community plays pop culture trivia.
* “White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars.”
* Classified docs reveal why Tolkien failed to win ’61 Nobel Prize!
* Solve the Fermi Paradox the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal way.
* And you probably already saw Paypal’s latest outrage, but man, it’s a doozy.
Gerry Canavan 